Wordplay

Boris Johnson, the mayor of London, arrived at the Morgan Library the other evening for the opening of an exhibition of Winston Churchill’s documents. He was due to deliver a speech, and, with forty-five minutes to go, his remarks were still unwritten. “I’ve got to think of something to say—it’s about Churchill’s use of language, is it?” he asked, as he was ushered into John Pierpont Morgan’s wood-panelled music room to prepare. “The power of words. Right.”

Alexander Boris de Pfeffel Johnson, who is forty-eight, has a yellow thatch, a hulking physique, and a voluptuous mien; he speaks with a plummy, sonorous facility befitting a onetime president of the Oxford Union. At Eton, he was a year or two ahead of David Cameron, the current Prime Minister. In 2001, he became a Conservative Member of Parliament for Henley, and was twice a Shadow Minister, for the arts and for education. Before entering politics, he was a journalist at the Daily Telegraph, for which he still writes a column, and was also the editor of The Spectator. His books include a memoir and a politico-comic novel, the crackerjack first sentence of which reads, “On what he had every reason to believe would be the last day of his undistinguished political career Roger Barlow awoke in a state of sexual excitement and with a gun to his head, the one fading as he became aware of the other.”

More recently, he is the author of a volume called “Johnson’s Life of London,” a history of the city told through a series of breezy essays on significant Londoners, ranging from Boudicca to Keith Richards and Churchill, the immediate subject of his attention. Johnson started jotting notes on the back of his day’s schedule. “What about a gag about ‘Never in the field . . . has so much been owed by so many’ ?” he said, cogitating. “There’s a joke in there somewhere, isn’t there?”

Having filled one sheet of paper with notes, Johnson tore off another. He glanced at his watch. “Fifteen minutes. Christ,” he said.

He continued writing. “I mean, the one thing Churchill does not legitimate, of course, is any kind of—Churchill never shagged the interns, basically, did he?” he said. “That was the truth, he didn’t. Which is a bit of a shame, because, generally, his otherwise inexcusable conduct is taken as legitimating just about anything else. He was drunk; he was rude; he was lachrymose; he made fantastic cockups—but he never, ever committed an indiscretion with a secretary.” Johnson’s own indiscretions are well known; he was fired from the front bench at Westminster after denying an affair, subsequently exposed, with a colleague at The Spectator. Johnson and his wife have four children; a source informed his biographer, “As well as being a philanderer he’s a great family man.”

Johnson believes that the press cares more about such matters than the public does. “I think most human beings are probably capable of falling from grace from time to time,” he observed. “Palmerston was famously caught out, and I think Disraeli said, ‘We have got to stop this getting out, because his popularity will only increase,’ and it did.” (The Prime Minister was named in a notorious divorce suit in 1863.) What the electorate really cares about, Johnson said, is whether you keep your promises. “What people possibly don’t like is the suggestion that in some way you use your position to enrich yourself, or to get some commercial advantage,” he said. “I suppose the argument would be that by becoming powerful you become more sexually charismatic, and that would be an abuse of democratic privilege the people have conferred on you. But that is too exhausting to go into.”

Johnson puzzled over his page again, thinking of something else to say. “Can I just make the point that Churchill used short words?” he asked. “Is it interesting?” Johnson studied classics at Oxford—he has suggested that the European Union would do better to promote the study of Latin rather than the Common Agricultural Policy—and argues that Churchill was most effective when he used words of Anglo-Saxon rather than Latinate origin. In his book on London, Johnson points out that the rousing sentence “We shall fight on the beaches, we shall fight on the landing grounds, we shall fight in the fields and in the streets, we shall fight in the hills; we shall never surrender” contains only one Latinate word, its last. “It interests me, because I am interested in words,” he said, scribbling. “I will try. I’ve got nothing else.”

He tore off another sheet from his schedule, pausing when he discovered that several words, also short ones, had already been scrawled upon it: “ ‘Baby I love you,’ ” he read. He shrugged. “I didn’t write it,” he said. There was no time to wonder who their author was—a functionary under the spell of his politically accrued charisma? Someone knocked on the door: time was up. Johnson gathered up his pages and headed for the museum’s atrium, where a lectern awaited. ♦